LAST OF HER TRIBE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19501, 9 June 1925, Page 8

LAST OF HER TRIBE.

THE END OF AH ERA. AUSTRALIAN SHIPPING MEMORIES. During the periods of the Easter and Christmas holidays the shipping company which keeps alive passenger and cargo communication between Port Jackson and Port Hunter —the oldest regular run in Australasian waters —puts on an extra craft to cope with the abnormal traffic, and the last, of the sea-going paddle-steamers still trading upon the coast of the commonwealth is brought from her moorings in . Iron Cove to Darling Harbour, and temporarily commissioned to assist the Hunter and the Gwydir in transporting the, great number of people who prefer to travel by sea between the two seaboard cities of New South Wales during these festive seasons (writes J. H. M. Abbott, in the Sydney Daily Telegraph of May 23). Twice a year, besides, does she ornament the coast —when either of the other of the company’s passenger steamers goes into Mort’s Dock for her annual overhaul. It is no exaggeration to say that the old Newcastle is an ornament to the shipping that passes by North Head and Nobbys—one has but to regard her yacht-like lines and the smart.rake of her funnels and masts, giving her an appearance of even greater speed than she possesses—though she is not by any means slow 7 —to recognise this fact. There have not been many pad'llesteamers built of pleasanter aspect than this survivor of a day that is done. And in her fittings and interior decorations she is a beautiful example of the sound work in mercantile shipping construction thar was turned out by British yards nearly half a century ago. The same is to be said of her engines. THE ODD NEWCASTLE. About mid-day on the Thursday before Easter, the writer set foot upon the old ship’s deck for what was probably somewhere about the hundredth occasion. She had been one of the crack ships of the coastal trade in earlier days, and, although there were bigger ones running between Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, there were none in which the inhabitants of the Hunter Valley and Northern New South Wales took greater pride or interest. She came from England, in 188-i to the old Newcastle Steamship Company—one of the two corporations that, soon after the completion of the railway connecting Sydney and Newcastle, merged into the present Newcastle and Hunter River S.S. Co., Ltd. The other was, of course, the Hunter River New Steam Navigation Company, Limited, founded in the early ’lities, whose only surviving vessel, the Namoi, is still afloat, though for some time out of commission, and unlikely ever to take part in the Hunter River trade again. THE PADDLE STEAMERS. As we passed • by Manly, Narrabeen, Broken Bay—with stately Lion Islaca standing like a little Rock of Gibraltar in the mouth of the Hawkesbury—beyond Cape Three Points, Terrigal Head, Norah Head, Bird Island, and along all that lovely CO miles of picturesque coast, one pondered many things about the Newcastle’s long career at sea. She had gone, for one thing,, a good way in her time. In a notebook one did a little arithmetic. Three voyages a week to Newcastle and back make 420 miles. If she did this for 48 weeks in the year —the company’s ships are usually in dock for about four weeks in each 12 month—that would come to a little more than 20,000 miles per annum. Allow her 30 years of such steaming, out of her career of 40, and you get 600,000 miles—that is. about two and a-half times the distance to the moon! And there was another queer notion to consider—that the Newcastle is the last of ■ the type of vessels, on the Australian coast at any rate, that began to navigate the Seven Seas under steam propulsion. She is the direct descendant of the queer little craft that Henrv Fulton astonished the United States and the world with on the Hudson River in 1807: of Henry Bell’s Comet, on the Clyde, in 1912; of David Napier’s 80-ton, 30 horse-power Rob Roy, w-hich paddled between Glasgow and Belfast, in 1818; of the Enterprise,, which steamed from England to the Cape of Good Hope in the phenomenal time of 57- days; of the Sophia Jane, which was the first steamer to roach Australia from England, in 1831; and of the Great, Eastern. All of these were paddle boats—though the last-named had a screw-propeller, as wall us her enormous side wheels. THE SOPHIA JANE. Strange it was, too, to think about the first steamer that slid these bays and headlands jutting out from the blue coastal ranges by the same means that were driving us up to the Hunter’s mouth that altornoon. It was 94 years since Captain Biddulph had first navigated his little paddlesteamer, the Sophia Jane, between Sydney and Newcastle, in the year that he arrived with her from England, her tall, failed funnel sending the first smoke streaming southward that had ever .'eon seen at sea from the shore over younder. She was a little ship of only 256 tons burthen, 20ft of beam, 6ft in depiu, and with 50 •horse-power engines that were capable of sending her along at a speed of about eight milos an hour—yet she must have been a wonder and a revelation to those who saw her pass oilt of Tort Jackson and enter Fort Hunter, as well as to those aboard the one or two wind-driven craft of small dimension she might have encountered on the voyage. Nothing iat those old sailor-men—men who remembered Trafalgar as no more distant than the Boer War is to us—nothing tha. they had ever seen at. sea was so miraculous as that little side-wheel packet plugging into the nor’oastor. Nothing that they could imagine could be more portentous of coming change, nothing more pregnant with possibilities. They might scoff at her, and call her a “tin-kettle,” or a “ puffing-billy” —but they could not have seen her go by them without experiencing an awe that was deeper than anytmng experienced by any of us at the sight of our first aeroplane. She was the first of a long line of vessels of the sort of which the Newcastle is the last. ' THE PIONEER SHIPS. It was a line that did remarkable developmental work in the history cf Now South Wales, that which plied for so many years between Sydney and Morpeth, 25 miles up the river from New-castle. What an important place the latter village once was is well evidenced by the great stone buildings—mills, warehouses, and factories—"hat still stand along and about the green and -fertile banks of the Hunter. All the traffic of the north came through Morpeth once. A cattle route to Sydney led over the Bulga, but every traveller from the plains beyond the Dividing Range, and from all the tributary valleys of the Hunter, caught the steam packet to Sydney in this little early colonial riverside township. Morpeth to-day is strangely like Windsor, on the Hawkesbury—each of them had for its original name the picturesque title of The Green Hills. Each of them stands in a Icvely and fertile country, whoso richness may be compared only with that of each other. Each of them has obviously seen better days. The ships were small —until the Namoi (1400 tons) and the Newcastle (1200 tons) joined the fleet, none of them had exceeded about 600 tons—but they coped with a great trade. The wide, white track their paddles made up and down the river, and up and down the coast, was a highway along which was carried the increasing wealth of a great province. They carried sturdy immigrants into the interior of a new, rich land, whoso possibilities have not yet been altogether realises. Perhaps no other line of shipping has ever done more to assist in the development of Australia. And the Newcastle is the last of them—the last of a breed that traces its lineage from the beginning of steam at sea. Motor ships and oil fuel are beginning another era in the history of navigation—hut the handsome, comfortable, dependable old vessel that occasionally comes out of Iron Cove to remind us of the past might still be supposed to say, as she passes them by in Port Jackson, or sees them coaling at the Dyke in Port Hunter: “Ah, well. I have done most of my work. See to it, my friends, that you do yours as well as mine, and that of my sisters, has been done.” It would not be unseemly on their part were they to dip their ensigns to the Newcastle.